Paint Me Red
by LionessAmaya
Summary: "The boy doesn't know many words." Matt-centric, light MelloxMatt. Also contains implied child abuse, and Canadian spelling of the word "colour". Drabble. Because what are we but a blur of colours on colours?


**paint me red**

The boy doesn't know many words.

The only ones he can pronounce are the ones he heard often, the ones the woman whispered; the fearful pleas to _run_ and _hide _and the scream she made when she fell, but that's not even a word, is it?

That aside, he can see others flashing in moments and moods, not just words but colours and tastes, all the things that create a "word" that's really just a sound that represents these things.

Rage, for instance, is one that he knows well, a flash of crimson and the metallic tang of fear-

Although maybe that's just the blood.

Hope is different. Hope is light and airy and desperately hard to cling to, although he tries and tries. He doesn't know the word, wouldn't recognize it if he heard it, but he knows the feeling and what does the noise really matter? He can see its fragility and translucence and tremendous value, and that's enough, really. He doesn't feel it often, only in those moments when his door stays closed and he feels that slight inkling that says maybe it won't open, maybe it will stay closed today and tomorrow and maybe he'll never be back and maybe someone will come for him and he'll leave it all behind and he'll learn new things like the yellow happiness of the girl next door.

And with that, the tiny wisp of hope, comes the renewal of the never-ending stream of _want._ It doesn't have a colour, really- it desperately tries to achieve yellow or orange or even the calmness of purple, but it can't quite get there and ends up looking plain and pitiful. It's a surge of pain and desperation, and something else that's _blacker_ and seems to blur into a little red that comes when he's feeling the want and he looks through the curtains and sees the yellow girl next door. But then he's frightened, because the red _rage_ is the man and he doesn't want to be the man and it fades into the dull hopeless grey and he closes the curtains until the next time.

_Sad_ blue is another rare one, and one he hates. It's an endless sea, or would be if he knew what a sea was, and he had no boat. It wasn't just the sad knowledge that this was his life- it was the wish that this wasn't his life. It was the sound of rain, seemingly never ending, drip, drip, drip and the cold and misery that took ages to fade after he had finished running his chores in said weather.

The resigned grey, the hopeless grey, is what he feels most often. It only vanishes when the oddest one comes along, the sober brown that says _this is my life, these are the cards I've been dealt, _and even though the boy's never heard the metaphor in his life he still grasps it's meaning, when he's brown. It's not a bad feeling, and it's on those days that he does everything as best as he can and takes the disapproval that comes regardless with a shrug, because at least he tried.

He feels lost, after they take him away from it all.

The colours vanish, when he enters. There are occasional flashes, but everyone seems to be grey and white, focused on one thing, one thing that he cannot possibly hope to comprehend because he just wants to find _happy_, the bright yellow and _peace_, the purple and serenity and calmness.

And then he meets him.

Mello.

Always flashing between _angry_ red and _happy _orange, and he's never seen _orange _in the _yellow _territory before and thinks that it's because this boy can't leave the _angry _behind completely. It's beautifully familiar, and maybe it's more of the _man_, the man who terrified him and pitched him into the blue, but it's still something to cling to.

The boy doesn't mind, for some reason, and a few years later Matt- because he's somehow gone from a nameless blur of colours to a named blur of colours- learns that red means more than just _anger._

_Passion_ is something that he's never seen before, and Mello teaches it to him in the black of the night. It's ecstasy and beauty and maybe a little love, and lustful moans and trust and release.

He almost forgets the other colours, lost in his finally achieved yellow and the deep red and the purple that follows it, until blue and grey come back to fill in the hole that Mello- and red- leave behind.

Because he left. He _left._

He lasts two months drowning in his own misery, before he's had enough of it. He marches out the door and tracks him down.

It isn't hard to find him, because he knows how he thinks, and when he does finally kick down the door and sees him jump a foot into the air, he punches him square in the too surprised, too familiar, too god damn pretty face.

It's the first time he's felt the red of rage in a long time.

It doesn't take much to make the slight shift into familiar territory, and clothes are torn off in a desperate frenzy, victim to the pain of separation and the desperate need to make up for lost time.

The months go on, and he's found content now, even if the yellow isn't quite so good as it used to be and the red doesn't come as often and the purple is never as satisfying with the ever-present black danger lurking just behind them.

Danger. Death.

He makes do with what he can get, and does what he can with the time he has left. He ignores the gaping hole trying to swallow him up, pretends he isn't racing against time, pretends that each moment isn't worth a million because how many of them does he have left?

(Until finally he can't anymore, because it's all that he can see.)


End file.
